Prospera
Article
Prospera is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 19 times across 19 issues between April 26, 2021 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Prospera has at least 1000 residents”; “What will Prospera’s population be in 2035? Approximately 0”; “two of the most promising existing charter city projects, Prospera”. It most often appears alongside Honduras, Charter Cities Institute, Prospera.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 19
- Issue count: 19
- First seen: April 26, 2021
- Last seen: October 28, 2025
Appears In
- Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021
- 21
- Model City Monday
- 21
- Links For September
- 21
- 21
- Grading My 2021 Predictions
- 22
- 23: California Dreamin’
- Highlights From The Comments On Last Week’s Model Cities Post
- Defying Cavity: Lantern Bioworks FAQ
- 24
- Open Thread 327
- Profile: The Far Out Initiative
- 24
- 25
- Your Review: Alpha School
- 25
Related Pages
-
- Honduras (12 shared issues)
-
- Charter Cities Institute (7 shared issues)
-
- Prospera (6 shared issues)
-
- Mark Lutter (5 shared issues)
-
- US (5 shared issues)
-
- ZEDE (5 shared issues)
-
- California (4 shared issues)
-
- California Forever (4 shared issues)
-
- Ciudad Morazan (4 shared issues)
-
- COVID (4 shared issues)
-
- Devon Zuegel (4 shared issues)
-
- Elon Musk (4 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than 50%: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%
What will Prospera’s population be in 2035? Approximately 0 Prospera is a charter city taking shape in Honduras; see here for more. They’re planning to have 10,000 residents by 2025, and 100,000 by some unspecified point in the future. Metaculus doesn’t think it will happen; more than half of forecasters say they’ll have fewer than 100 residents in 2035 (presumably because they have failed and ceased to exist) and only 10% of forecasters think they’ll have more than 10,000, which would be a bare minimum for partial success. So far no predictions on Ciudad Morazan, the other incipient Honduran charter city.
Inline links: Approximately 0
In his response to Rethink Priorities (mentioned above), Lutter said the World Bank’s study on SEZs wasn’t applicable because charter cities were going to be bigger and better than SEZs’ 0.5 - 10 km^2. But two of the most promising existing charter city projects, Prospera and Ciudad Morazan, are starting on land of 0.25 km^2 (though they could get larger). Lutter is suitably concerned:
He goes on to express optimism that at least Ciudad Morazan can scale (Prospera seems to be trying to attract remote workers, and it’s harder to see how to leverage that into agglomeration effects).
Ciudad Morazan is aiming at a more down-to-earth and scaleable kind of development than the snazzy high-tech island city of Prospera. But also:
Inline links: Ciudad Morazan, Prospera
Honduras remains the country to watch in the charter city sphere, with its ZEDE law allowing unprecedented levels of freedom and protection. I’d previously written about two Honduran projects, the high-tech island hub of Prospera and the industrial heartland project of Ciudad Morazan. Now there’s a third: ZEDE Orquidea (“Orchid Zone”).
Inline links: previously written about
I’m not really impressed with their publicity effort (my browser insists their website is a security hazard and won’t let me access it). My only real source of information is this Reddit post by another charter city enthusiast, who writes:
Inline links: this Reddit post
(source) The Honduran news sources covering Orquidea focus on an argument about whether it is trying to expropriate land: they say they’re not, the people who live near them say they are. I can’t follow the poorly-translated Spanish well enough to have an opinion about this, but my much deeper dive into the Prospera situation makes me think it would be hard for them to do this even if they wanted to (which they deny). Also, the surrounding community has accused them of: …violence against defenders of the land, human trafficking, discrimination, sexual exploitation, exploitation of people of sexual diversity, lack of recognition of labor rights and curtailment of the rights of the family and children such as education and health …which is a pretty impressive list of misdeeds for a polity which has only existed for a couple of weeks. My guess is this is the thing where they pre-emptively accuse ZEDEs of every bad thing that has ever happened, just because it seems like the sorts of thing they might do. But I guess we’ll find out - they supposedly have given people a “40 day ultimatum” to leave their land (they deny having given this ultimatum), so I’ll check back in forty days and see what’s happened. Butterfly Effect Unlike Orquidea, Mariposa (Spanish for “butterfly”) has a beautiful website. They have a list of all the noble important principles they espouse, and all the human rights they’re going to focus on respecting. Your white paper says “model city”, but your branding says “birth control pill”. When you look at the small print, they “are still working on our master plan to be presented to the Honduran Government in the near future”, ie they haven’t gotten any kind of official go-ahead and are only in the “cool idea” phase right now. Still, let’s take a look. Mariposa’s core values include: Polycentric governance, seemingly inspired by cryptocurrency.
18: Devon Zuegel actually physically visits the charter city of Prospera and writes a very long FAQ about what she learned.
Inline links: a very long FAQ
Still, if they can pull this off it would be amazing. Right now we can’t create big cities at will. There’s a lot of demand for big cities (witness all the people moving to NYC and SF despite high prices), but the supply stays capped. It’s a coordination problem: if three million people agreed to create a new big city, a new big city would happen - and they’d be in on the ground floor with land prices. But nobody wants to be the first (or the second, or the 99,999th) person to move to a random uninhabited desert that could potentially become a new metropolis later. Maybe making a lot of big promises like this is what the city creation process looks like. In the end you’d get a new big city, it would probably be more sustainable and walkable than average just because it’s new and well-planned, and even if it wasn’t any more innovative and diverse and inclusive than everywhere else, at least it’s no worse. And all your investors are super rich. Prospera, Honduras The latest from Prospera is some kind of drama with the neighboring community of Crawfish Rock over water rights. News site Rest Of World gives local leaders’ version:
Inline links: Rest Of World
The latest from Prospera is some kind of drama with the neighboring community of Crawfish Rock over water rights. News site Rest Of World gives local leaders’ version:
Inline links: Rest Of World
Devon Zuegel, a friend of the blog who was on the ground at Prospera at the time, gives the ZEDE’s version:
These are still preliminary; this person argues that the Nationalists might pick up a few more seats as more conservative rural areas get counted. Liberty and Refoundation (the socialists) will probably enter into a coalition with the Savior Party and have 65/128 seats for a bare majority. They need 86 votes for a 2/3 majority, which in theory they can get if the Liberal Party agrees. The Liberal Party seems centrist and hard to pin down, but this article includes the following great quote: “The Liberal Party opposes the ZEDEs because, above all, they undercut our national sovereignty, and because we don’t want them to become hideouts for extraditable criminals,” said [Liberal Party leader Yani] Rosenthal, who served a three-year prison sentence in the United States for money laundering and participating in a criminal scheme with the Los Cachiros cartel. Rosenthal kind of goes back and forth elsewhere, but in the end I think he’ll vote with the socialists on this. Still, there’s some speculation that his party might not vote as a bloc, and even a few defectors would be enough to prevent a supermajority. In theory, even if the socialists win two consecutive votes, they have to give the projects ten years to wind down. Ten years is forever in politics, and probably before then the capitalists will get back into power and say never mind, everyone can keep doing what they’re doing. The socialists are aware of this and say that their supplementary strategy is to have everything about the ZEDE law declared unconstitutional. This should be a hard sell, because ZEDEs are a constitutional amendment, plus the current Supreme Court explicitly ruled a few years ago that they were constitutional. But apparently the Honduran Supreme Court can declare constitutional amendments unconstitutional if it really wants. And the new government will get to appoint a new Supreme Court in two years, and although the exact process is complicated, they may be able to get people who agree with them on this. Also, incoming president Castro is married to Manuel Zelaya, a former president who tried to pull an Andrew Jackson after the Supreme Court ordered him to stop holding an illegal referendum to change term limits in his favor. He ordered the military to hold the referendum anyway, and was only ousted after the military couped him instead. So this is not exactly a family known for their deep respect for the exact wordings of laws or court rulings (not that anyone in Honduras has really excelled on that front). See further speculation eg here and here. And here’s Mark Lutter from Charter Cities Institute on the elections and the future. Conchagua Volcano, El Salvador Meanwhile, insane El Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele says he is ordering the construction of a coin-shaped city dedicated to Bitcoin at the base of a stratovolcano: "Residential areas, commercial areas, services, museums, entertainment, bars, restaurants, airport, port, rail - everything devoted to Bitcoin," the 40-year-old said. And: The president, who appeared on stage wearing a baseball cap backwards, said that no income taxes would be levied in the city, only value added tax (VAT). He said that half of the revenue gained from this would be used to "to build up the city", while the rest would be used to keep the streets "neat and clean" […] Mr Bukele did not provide dates for construction or completion of the city, but said he estimated that much of the public infrastructure would cost around 300,000 Bitcoins. It’s tempting to dismiss this plan as crazy. First, this photo: Second, Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo. They want cheap electricity. Bukele has promised that there will be cheap geothermal power from the volcano, which sounds good, but this article says El Salvador’s existing geothermal energy costs about 12 cents/kilowatt-hour, much higher than the 4 cents/megawatt-hour miners can get in the current cheapest areas. Maybe El Salvador could do a really good job upgrading their energy infrastructure, but at some point you’re subsidizing this rather than using it as a cash cow. And third, this isn’t even the stupidest plan to build a cryptocurrency-themed city in the Third World. That arguably goes to Akon City, a thing where a pop singer named Akon was going to build a cryptocurrency city in Senegal. Now, without any construction having started, they’re planning to build a second one in Uganda! All competing for the same handful of crypto companies! But I looked into Bukele to see if he was a moron with a habit of coming up with terrible ideas. It seems like no. He rose from nothing to become El Salvador’s first outside-the-traditional-party-system president, and has an approval rating of around 90%. And apparently he’s presided over a historic drop in the homicide rate of this previously murder-capital-of-the-world country. Although I’m betting that one day he’ll make a great Dictator Book Club entry, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on “doesn’t do stupid things for no reason” What’s the non-stupid explanation for this? Maybe it’s supposed to be a signal. You can give up 5% of the way through, but even trying to build a Bitcoin-shaped city at least shows very conclusively that you’ve got a crypto-friendly regulatory climate, so many easily-spooked crypto companies will flock to you. This makes sense in the context of big crypto companies moving to the Caribbean for regulatory reasons, eg FTX moving to the Bahamas and Binance moving to the Cayman Islands. But if I understand correctly, both of these companies make on the order of $1 billion a year. If El Salvador can tax them at 5% (dubious, since a big part of promising a friendly regulatory climate is low taxes), that’s still only $100 million if they can capture both of them. Which they can’t, because these companies seem happy where they are. And I don’t think there are a lot of similarly-sized crypto companies looking for Central American homes that I don’t know about. And even though El Salvador is pretty poor, it’s not so poor that $100 million is worth embarrassing themselves over. So I’m stumped. EDIT: See this comment. Praxis, aka Bluebook Cities, the Internet Speaking of stumped, who are these people? Right now, they’re a web page with a lot of buzz promising the City Of The Future, in very poetic language: Praxis is a grassroots movement of modern pioneers building a new city. We are technologists and artists, builders and dreamers. We are building a place where we can develop to our fullest potentials, physically, culturally, and spiritually. Bitcoin was developed as a financial technology with political goals identical to those of the Founding Fathers: liberation. The ultimate end of crypto is the possibility of a future for humanity unshackled from the institutions that seek to limit our growth. Our ultimate goal is to bring about a more vital future for humanity, and we will use technology to achieve this righteous end. Our civilization is unwell. We eat food that kills us, we’ve lost sight of beauty, and we neglect our spiritual lives. The world is deranged and decayed, and this frightens people. We don’t look up from our screens; we seek to live within them. Crypto is a fundamentally political technology -- escape to the metaverse is a betrayal of the principles on which it was founded. We are descended from the people who built Rome and Athens, who dared to split atoms and voyage to the Moon. We can build new worlds not just of bits, but of atoms. But where is this city? What will its policies be? As we leave old lands, our values are our compass. Like wolves, tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity. For voyaging tribes to settle, they must perform murmurations: intricate coordination with little communication, at scale. This is only possible with a strong sense of asabiyya (group feeling derived from deeply-held shared values). Our values inform the destiny we desire, and for which we struggle. Asabiyya is forged in this struggle. With asabiyya, pioneers can earn the divine mandate to build a city. Cities are the fount of human ingenuity. In cities, people enjoy their fullest potential by contributing their resources under the auspices of civilization. Who even are you? What experience do you have with city-building? Civilizations rise and fall. All around us, we see civilizational decay. The people are not vital: physically, culturally, spiritually. We live in an era of obesity, remakes, and pollution. We are losing the divine mandate, and in an era of absolute weapons, what’s at stake is everything. But perhaps there’s some glory in death by a light brighter than a thousand suns. A worse fate may await humanity: atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste, minds occupied by the petty amusements of a corporate metaverse. There, nothing is at stake; there are no frontiers to explore; no growth is possible. Nothing to live for, and nothing to die for. As we walk between these twin fates, the light of our civilization dims. But beyond the horizon, we see a new light emerging. Like the sun at dawn, it cannot be stopped. Vitality itself is the foundational value of this new civilizational form, and we have the technology to enact our moral imperative as never before. You’re not answering my…okay, fine, whatever, forget it. As far as I can tell, Praxis is two 25-year-olds with no previous experience, armed with about $10 million in Peter Thiel’s money. Peter Thiel is a smart person known for having good business sense, but he’s also known to have a weakness for young people who dream big and sound like purveyors of esoteric secrets. I wonder if the simplest explanation is just that this is one of the cases where his weakness got the better of his sense, and now these two random people have $10 million earmarked for building a city, and no idea what to do. [CORRECTION: some people involved in Praxis have reached out to tell me that it was $4 million instead of $10 million, and that it was Thiel-backed Pronomos and not Thiel himself. I’ll be getting in touch with them to learn if there are other issues or things I should correct here] But that’s not how they put it! The way they put it is - all previous charter city founders have started by approaching governments and pitching their ideas. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: governments don’t want to give land to a purely hypothetical city that might not pan out, and the city can’t pan out until governments give it land. Praxis’ plan is to build the community first, then go to a government saying “Here’s 50,000 people who have agreed to join our city, and lots of businesses and organizations that are excited about it. Please give us land for our guaranteed-success, concretely-existing project.” Now this is a different chicken-and-egg problem: why join a community of people with no land and no plans? Praxis writes: What if we try to draw people to new cities not on an economic basis, but rather on a spiritual one? Which city (or country) founding projects have succeeded that have drawn people on a predominantly non-economic, but rather spiritual basis? Among others, Israel and America. Both groups were oppressed, and sought the freedom to live by their values. Both felt the intangible pull of the frontier. Both had a keen historical instinct. This is how cities with spiritual significance are founded. The correct approach to city building in this new world is demand-first (or as Balaji Srinivasan calls it, Cloud City first). We build the citizenry before the city. First, we create communities of true believers, organized around shared values, online. People move to cities for people, and it follows that if you collect a group of people who all want to live together, they’ll all move together if at a moment in time everyone else does, too. Today, we have new tools. The emergence of Web3 enables us to supercharge communities with self-ownership, governance, and determination. Once you build a community of people ready to move to a new city together, you can self-finance the entire project. With something real to offer nations, conversations with governments become productive (e.g. Gigafactory). That’s how you make the risk dominoes fall. The problem is, Israel worked because it had Judaism. Judaism is a very specific belief. Prospera is specifically libertarian, Telosa is specifically Georgist, and even the Bitcoin-shaped volcano city knows what it’s about. What is Praxis? The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me - there’s a right-wing meme about how the media keeps trying to get people to eat bugs, and how this is the shape our future dystopia will take. But whether I’m right or wrong, the fact that it’s hard to tell is a problem. The only other clues we’re getting are their Discord, which seems to be focused around getting a currency called PRAX for completing tasks. Once you get enough, you can become a Member, which seems to be where the real excitement starts. (source) I’m not even being sarcastic - I expect being a member to be quite fun. I say this because when I was a teenager I was part of a bunch of country simulation projects, some of which got past the inherent nerdiness of being a country simulation project exactly the same way Praxis is doing it - by saying that we were going to become a real country someday, as soon as we were big enough to convince people. These were usually fun and interesting and educational, and I made lots of great like-minded teenage and twenty-something friends. But none of them ever came close to becoming a real country, and I’m not sure it was merely for lack of millions of dollars. I hope I’m wrong and they manage to forge new lands through struggle to uplift the human spirit or whatever. Elsewhere In Model Cities Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.
Inline links: this person, this article, some speculation, here, on the elections and the future, says, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SuHh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a12676-81c4-49a8-bb20-815d1c3f660b_763x509.jpeg, with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo, this article, Akon City, a second one, Bukele, a historic drop in the homicide rate, Dictator Book Club, moving to the Bahamas, moving to the Cayman Islands, this comment, promising the City Of The Future, far as I can tell, the media keeps trying, their Discord, tasks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2TK6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F020ebe08-e968-45cd-ba39-a91cdc6e5892_473x533.png, source, a bunch of country simulation projects, the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies
Second, Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo. They want cheap electricity. Bukele has promised that there will be cheap geothermal power from the volcano, which sounds good, but this article says El Salvador’s existing geothermal energy costs about 12 cents/kilowatt-hour, much higher than the 4 cents/megawatt-hour miners can get in the current cheapest areas. Maybe El Salvador could do a really good job upgrading their energy infrastructure, but at some point you’re subsidizing this rather than using it as a cash cow. And third, this isn’t even the stupidest plan to build a cryptocurrency-themed city in the Third World. That arguably goes to Akon City, a thing where a pop singer named Akon was going to build a cryptocurrency city in Senegal. Now, without any construction having started, they’re planning to build a second one in Uganda! All competing for the same handful of crypto companies! But I looked into Bukele to see if he was a moron with a habit of coming up with terrible ideas. It seems like no. He rose from nothing to become El Salvador’s first outside-the-traditional-party-system president, and has an approval rating of around 90%. And apparently he’s presided over a historic drop in the homicide rate of this previously murder-capital-of-the-world country. Although I’m betting that one day he’ll make a great Dictator Book Club entry, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on “doesn’t do stupid things for no reason” What’s the non-stupid explanation for this? Maybe it’s supposed to be a signal. You can give up 5% of the way through, but even trying to build a Bitcoin-shaped city at least shows very conclusively that you’ve got a crypto-friendly regulatory climate, so many easily-spooked crypto companies will flock to you. This makes sense in the context of big crypto companies moving to the Caribbean for regulatory reasons, eg FTX moving to the Bahamas and Binance moving to the Cayman Islands. But if I understand correctly, both of these companies make on the order of $1 billion a year. If El Salvador can tax them at 5% (dubious, since a big part of promising a friendly regulatory climate is low taxes), that’s still only $100 million if they can capture both of them. Which they can’t, because these companies seem happy where they are. And I don’t think there are a lot of similarly-sized crypto companies looking for Central American homes that I don’t know about. And even though El Salvador is pretty poor, it’s not so poor that $100 million is worth embarrassing themselves over. So I’m stumped. EDIT: See this comment. Praxis, aka Bluebook Cities, the Internet Speaking of stumped, who are these people? Right now, they’re a web page with a lot of buzz promising the City Of The Future, in very poetic language: Praxis is a grassroots movement of modern pioneers building a new city. We are technologists and artists, builders and dreamers. We are building a place where we can develop to our fullest potentials, physically, culturally, and spiritually. Bitcoin was developed as a financial technology with political goals identical to those of the Founding Fathers: liberation. The ultimate end of crypto is the possibility of a future for humanity unshackled from the institutions that seek to limit our growth. Our ultimate goal is to bring about a more vital future for humanity, and we will use technology to achieve this righteous end. Our civilization is unwell. We eat food that kills us, we’ve lost sight of beauty, and we neglect our spiritual lives. The world is deranged and decayed, and this frightens people. We don’t look up from our screens; we seek to live within them. Crypto is a fundamentally political technology -- escape to the metaverse is a betrayal of the principles on which it was founded. We are descended from the people who built Rome and Athens, who dared to split atoms and voyage to the Moon. We can build new worlds not just of bits, but of atoms. But where is this city? What will its policies be? As we leave old lands, our values are our compass. Like wolves, tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity. For voyaging tribes to settle, they must perform murmurations: intricate coordination with little communication, at scale. This is only possible with a strong sense of asabiyya (group feeling derived from deeply-held shared values). Our values inform the destiny we desire, and for which we struggle. Asabiyya is forged in this struggle. With asabiyya, pioneers can earn the divine mandate to build a city. Cities are the fount of human ingenuity. In cities, people enjoy their fullest potential by contributing their resources under the auspices of civilization. Who even are you? What experience do you have with city-building? Civilizations rise and fall. All around us, we see civilizational decay. The people are not vital: physically, culturally, spiritually. We live in an era of obesity, remakes, and pollution. We are losing the divine mandate, and in an era of absolute weapons, what’s at stake is everything. But perhaps there’s some glory in death by a light brighter than a thousand suns. A worse fate may await humanity: atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste, minds occupied by the petty amusements of a corporate metaverse. There, nothing is at stake; there are no frontiers to explore; no growth is possible. Nothing to live for, and nothing to die for. As we walk between these twin fates, the light of our civilization dims. But beyond the horizon, we see a new light emerging. Like the sun at dawn, it cannot be stopped. Vitality itself is the foundational value of this new civilizational form, and we have the technology to enact our moral imperative as never before. You’re not answering my…okay, fine, whatever, forget it. As far as I can tell, Praxis is two 25-year-olds with no previous experience, armed with about $10 million in Peter Thiel’s money. Peter Thiel is a smart person known for having good business sense, but he’s also known to have a weakness for young people who dream big and sound like purveyors of esoteric secrets. I wonder if the simplest explanation is just that this is one of the cases where his weakness got the better of his sense, and now these two random people have $10 million earmarked for building a city, and no idea what to do. [CORRECTION: some people involved in Praxis have reached out to tell me that it was $4 million instead of $10 million, and that it was Thiel-backed Pronomos and not Thiel himself. I’ll be getting in touch with them to learn if there are other issues or things I should correct here] But that’s not how they put it! The way they put it is - all previous charter city founders have started by approaching governments and pitching their ideas. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: governments don’t want to give land to a purely hypothetical city that might not pan out, and the city can’t pan out until governments give it land. Praxis’ plan is to build the community first, then go to a government saying “Here’s 50,000 people who have agreed to join our city, and lots of businesses and organizations that are excited about it. Please give us land for our guaranteed-success, concretely-existing project.” Now this is a different chicken-and-egg problem: why join a community of people with no land and no plans? Praxis writes: What if we try to draw people to new cities not on an economic basis, but rather on a spiritual one? Which city (or country) founding projects have succeeded that have drawn people on a predominantly non-economic, but rather spiritual basis? Among others, Israel and America. Both groups were oppressed, and sought the freedom to live by their values. Both felt the intangible pull of the frontier. Both had a keen historical instinct. This is how cities with spiritual significance are founded. The correct approach to city building in this new world is demand-first (or as Balaji Srinivasan calls it, Cloud City first). We build the citizenry before the city. First, we create communities of true believers, organized around shared values, online. People move to cities for people, and it follows that if you collect a group of people who all want to live together, they’ll all move together if at a moment in time everyone else does, too. Today, we have new tools. The emergence of Web3 enables us to supercharge communities with self-ownership, governance, and determination. Once you build a community of people ready to move to a new city together, you can self-finance the entire project. With something real to offer nations, conversations with governments become productive (e.g. Gigafactory). That’s how you make the risk dominoes fall. The problem is, Israel worked because it had Judaism. Judaism is a very specific belief. Prospera is specifically libertarian, Telosa is specifically Georgist, and even the Bitcoin-shaped volcano city knows what it’s about. What is Praxis? The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me - there’s a right-wing meme about how the media keeps trying to get people to eat bugs, and how this is the shape our future dystopia will take. But whether I’m right or wrong, the fact that it’s hard to tell is a problem. The only other clues we’re getting are their Discord, which seems to be focused around getting a currency called PRAX for completing tasks. Once you get enough, you can become a Member, which seems to be where the real excitement starts. (source) I’m not even being sarcastic - I expect being a member to be quite fun. I say this because when I was a teenager I was part of a bunch of country simulation projects, some of which got past the inherent nerdiness of being a country simulation project exactly the same way Praxis is doing it - by saying that we were going to become a real country someday, as soon as we were big enough to convince people. These were usually fun and interesting and educational, and I made lots of great like-minded teenage and twenty-something friends. But none of them ever came close to becoming a real country, and I’m not sure it was merely for lack of millions of dollars. I hope I’m wrong and they manage to forge new lands through struggle to uplift the human spirit or whatever. Elsewhere In Model Cities Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.
Inline links: with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo, this article, Akon City, a second one, Bukele, a historic drop in the homicide rate, Dictator Book Club, moving to the Bahamas, moving to the Cayman Islands, this comment, promising the City Of The Future, far as I can tell, the media keeps trying, their Discord, tasks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2TK6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F020ebe08-e968-45cd-ba39-a91cdc6e5892_473x533.png, source, a bunch of country simulation projects, the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies
1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%
Prospera, the first and largest ZEDE, has (as usual) dominated press coverage. They state that the government hasn’t asked them to shut down, that the government continues to accept payments Prospera owes them for its continued operation, and that when Prospera has told the government that it plans to keep operating, nobody in the government has objected.
Inline links: Prospera
— This (~4:00) is my main source for Prospera’s position and what they’ve done. —
But also, some people are taking them seriously. VCs including Balaji Srinivasan has invested $2 million. The group claims to have 50,000 followers on Clubhouse. They’ve been featured on TechCrunch and (very briefly) Marginal Revolution. I would, however, briefly challenge their claim to be “the first ever Internet country”. People have been building Internet countries as long as there has been an Internet. I’m not sure which was actually first, but I know the Kingdom of Talossa has been online since 1995. A 2000 New York Times article on the Internet country phenomenon profiled Talossa, but was already able to give six other examples. And although these were perhaps easy to miss, Danny Wallace started the Kingdom of Lovely, a “partly Internet-based project that claims a small amount of territory”, on a widely-viewed BBC documentary in 2007. I myself got involved in an online country project back when I was a teenager in the early 2000s. Although no venture capitalists appeared to give me giant bags of money, it got a few dozen “citizens” and some fun government institutions before finally petering out around 2015. I guess what I’m saying is - I’m available as an Internet country building consultant with fifteen years experience. And no, I don’t accept payment in NFTs. Oh, You’re Still Here? Meanwhile, in Honduras, it isn’t all legal doom and gloom. Prospera has also been making real progress, as measured in pretty photos. Two Roatan resorts, Las Verandas and Pristine Bay, have joined Prospera. The ZEDE law saying that landowners can voluntarily annex their land into a willing ZEDE: Las Verandas Pristine Bay Prospera is also building a high-tech wood processing factory that will eventually produce parts for its other construction efforts: Current construction progress Planned final appearance And its first multi-story apartment buildings: Current construction progress Planned final appearance It will also be hosting gene therapy company Mini Circle, which runs clinical trials for innovative medical procedures. Granting that many of its studies (treatments for HIV, muscular dystrophy, obesity, etc) seem great and important, it perhaps seems suspicious that they would want to do this in a charter city? The company writes that “the cost of running a trial in Prospera is less than 1/1000th the cost of the United States”, which seems good in ways but does not entirely allay my concern. I was originally worried that they would be experimenting on Hondurans or something, but looking at the site it looks like they’re recruiting worldwide and would probably fly Americans (or whoever else) to Honduras for the therapy. Their site features a quote from friend-of-the-blog Alex K Chen, who says: Minicircle's bioscientists have one of the most enlightened risk taking calculi I have observed anywhere. In an environment where extreme hesitance to take any risk holds back scientific progress, they have the openness to imagine, try and measure just about any legal intervention putting them in a very strong position to both produce a significant measurable decrease in the human rate of aging, and to inspire more people to do what they never thought was possible. I think the only way this could get more mad science points is if it used the phrase “small-minded fools”. Mind you, I think mad science points are good, I just hope everyone else sees it that way and my optimism turns out justified. Also, apparently the clinical trials have NFTs, because of course they do. At least they’re not commemorative NFTs - they seem to play a load-bearing role where they help participants be incentivized to complete all the necessary tests. Also, low-cost eco-residences! Shorts 1: I previously mentioned the scam/fiasco/insane-idea of Hammer City, a planned black nationalist city in the Rocky Mountains. I knew it had failed, but I didn’t know exactly how. Now Colorado Sun has investigated. The proximal reason it failed was because the black nationalists started moving their paramilitary onto the land before they had officially bought it, the owner called the cops, and the cops removed them. The Hammer City team has not given back any of the $112,000 which they raised from extremely credulous donors (without using NFTs, even!) 2: The Charter Cities Institute continues doing the long-term ground-level work necessary to create long-term well-grounded charter cities which will be much too boring and responsible for me to write silly profiles of. Some of their most recent work has been with the Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition, which “convenes and mobilizes key stakeholders who are dedicated to harnessing Africa’s rapid urbanization for human prosperity”. 3: Also, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization to start a charter city of his own, no public details yet. CCI will be looking for a new executive director. 4: Speaking of Disney, they’ve been building on their model city expertise and magical storybook branding by creating planned communities around the US - Story Living By Disney, starting with Rancho Mirage California. Realistically it just looks like a very nice planned community, but this planned community comes with the option to have people make fun of you forever for living in a Disney community as an adult. Predictions for this month: Prospera is still substantially a functioning ZEDE in 2025: 70%
Inline links: TechCrunch, Marginal Revolution, Kingdom of Talossa, online since 1995, 2000 New York Times article, involved, Las Verandas, Pristine Bay, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dYxp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc16a62d7-1b52-4fe4-b90a-66c4f1b04101_1280x720.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KJAN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F373a13d3-0b61-4d6a-a4ac-92603c37b111_1280x720.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bhg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3f046579-f61b-44aa-b71e-6f5af5d6c23e_1280x960.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!m5Lg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faaf75e74-8afa-4af1-96e3-1d4a1e91bf39_1280x720.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!d_hY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0082aa8d-b926-43f9-af75-36613937362e_1280x864.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_G7z!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc74e9e5-527d-4f66-9c84-b59ec616efc8_1280x719.jpeg, Mini Circle, the clinical trials have NFTs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Mfsk!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdbaafb7e-9fc6-4fe9-abe1-e5fe0c018dd3_1024x768.jpeg, Colorado Sun has investigated, Charter Cities Institute, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization, Story Living By Disney, Rancho Mirage California
Seen on the Praxis founder’s Twitter account. Milady is some kind of NFT thing, otherwise it makes as much sense to me as it does to you. But the other half of the paradox is the constant rumors that they’re competent and have some kind of good plan. These are spoken only in hushed whispers, I don’t know the details. But in 2021, they raised $4 million in a seed round from well-regarded venture capitalists whose investments usually make money. In 2022 they raised another $15 million in a Series A round from . . . okay, partly from Sam Bankman-Fried and Three Arrows Capital, two notorious crypto scammers. But you would think scammers would be extra careful not to invest their own money in scams! Also, they recently signed on David Weinreb, a completely normal (and well-regarded) city planner person. What’s the strategy that both involves both Milady Raves and lots of competent people agreeing you’re a good investment? One strategy is something like: buy some land somewhere. Build some houses and streets. Convince digital nomads to move there on the grounds that you are very cool and visionary. Do some cool and visionary seeming things, or at least throw some really good raves. Other digital nomads get jealous and move there too. Sell parcels of land to these people, get rich, pay back your investors. And then who knows, maybe create a new civilization that redefines what it means to be human. Consider Elon Musk. Elon Musk is good at certain business-related skills. But that’s not the essence of Elon Musk. The essence of Elon Musk is that he’s a Visionary who can bring the Glorious Future. We know this because he’s a crazy person who says stuff that doesn’t really make sense. When Elon Musk buys a company, its value goes up - maybe partly because people expect Musk to make good business decisions, but also partly because now the company is part of Musk’s Glorious Future, and therefore exciting. Employees, customers, and investors all get excited and reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. And although Musk might not always accomplish the exact Glorious Future future he promises, his companies do well and make money, because having motivated employees, star-struck customers, and willing investors is a great combination. Elon Musk has an aura of destiny because he succeeded at his first several companies. Dryden Brown of Praxis Society, lacking a Paypal Mafia to join, is trying to hack together an aura of destiny out of raves and angel-related videos. So far it seems to be going pretty okay. Prospera Sues Honduras For 2/3 Of Its National Budget To refresh: in the mid-2010s Honduras’ pro-market government created ZEDEs - businesses that bought up unoccupied land could start their own districts with their own preferred legal system in exchange for bringing in investment. The government knew businesses wouldn’t invest long-term if the next government could just cancel the agreement and seize all of their stuff, so they fortified the law with as much protection as possible. It would take a long constitutional amendment process to repeal, and ZEDE investors might be able to object to any changes under international investment treaties. Lured by these protections, three companies started ZEDEs, including a big high-profile one called Prospera. In early 2022, a socialist government took power, and started trying their best to destroy the ZEDEs. They started the constitutional amendment process (they seem to think they’ve finished it, but a Prospera rep I talked to believe they have to hold another vote by the end of this year, something I see no signs of them doing) and have been harassing and stonewalling existing ZEDEs. One ZEDE, Orquidea, shut down immediately. A second, Ciudad Morazan, seems to still be operating but I cannot figure out exactly how or why. Prospera has been most vocal in its opposition, and sued Honduras for $11 billion in the World Bank’s court of investment arbitration. (Prospera has only spent about $100 million so far, so it’s unclear why they deserve 100x that in penalties. Also $11 billion is “two-thirds of the 2022 Honduran national budget”, and forcing Honduras to pay it would cause national catastrophe. This might be more of a highball offer than a number they actually expect to get.) This article (poorly translated from Spanish, sorry) has the most information. It suggests Honduras believes they signed onto the investment treaties “with reservations”, ie conditional on being allowed to do things like shut down ZEDEs, and that therefore the suit is meaningless and they will not defend themselves. Although the magazine is on the government’s side of the overall issue, it suggests they didn’t actually sign on with reservations, that the country’s lawyers might just have no idea what they’re talking about, and that their bold strategy of refusing to defend themselves will not pay off. In contrast, Prospera has prestigious lawyers specializing in exactly this area, so things aren’t looking good for the government. Honduras seems to recognize this and is threatening to withdraw from ICSID, the international investment treaty that governs such disputes. This wouldn’t be completely unprecedented - Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have also done this. But ICSID rules say that withdrawing from ICSID, while it might help prevent future cases against you, doesn’t cancel existing cases, and wouldn’t protect Honduras against Prospera’s claim. (How would ICSID collect against Honduras if they lost? I don’t know, but I assume the global financial order has some way to make your life worse if you defy it.) I think everyone is hoping Honduras realizes that cancelling a flourishing economic zone that’s bringing lots of investment into the country at no cost to them - just isn’t worth taking an $11 billion loss, cancelling international treaties, and scaring off future investment. But who knows how these people think? In other Prospera news: Prospera announces another $36 million in recent investment, which I take as evidence that VCs with good lawyers and research departments also think its case is very strong.
Inline links: the Praxis founder’s Twitter account, raised $4 million in a seed round, raised another $15 million in a Series A round, recently signed on David Weinreb, To refresh:, harassing and stonewalling, sued Honduras for $11 billion, This article, threatening to withdraw from ICSID, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have also done this, announces another $36 million in recent investment
Prospera announces another $36 million in recent investment, which I take as evidence that VCs with good lawyers and research departments also think its case is very strong.
Inline links: announces another $36 million in recent investment
Niklas Anzinger has written The Ultimate Prospera Guide For Entrepreneurs, with advice for Hondurans, tech entrepreneurs, and others about how and why to get involved.
Inline links: The Ultimate Prospera Guide For Entrepreneurs
Comments On Prospera DamienCh writes:
Inline links: writes
Now, given all that, what to do of the Prospera case ? In my view, and having not seen anything else beyond what's publicly available, it's a typical investment dispute, could fare relatively well (they have good lawyers), but they won't get 11 billion USD (though that depends a lot on the arbitrators).
I also heard from Niklas Anzinger, who’s in touch with Prospera’s leaders and legal team including technical secretary Jorge Colindres, and who was able to give me more clarity on the situation. Remember, the last government passed a constitutional amendment allowing ZEDEs. The new government has to repeal the amendment in order to ban them. The repeal process requires winning two votes in Congress within ~2 years. They won the first in spring 2022. Their deadline to win the second is January 2024. They’ve made no attempt to start the second vote and Niklas thinks the political climate has shifted and they wouldn’t win. So legally the ZEDE regime is still in place, so much so that people can even apply to start new ZEDEs (although the government would refuse the application).
Phase 1: (January 2024) Sell to biohackers in Prospera for $20,000.
Lantern spent $400,000 acquiring rights and synthesizing the organism. Their first priority is to get out of the hole. So to start, they’ll be selling Lumina in Prospera, a libertarian charter city in Honduras. Prospera allows the sale of any biotech product under an informed consent rule: as long as the company is open about risks and the patient signs a waiver saying they were informed, people can do what they want.
Inline links: Prospera
By good luck, Prospera will soon be hosting a two month super-conference of biotech and crypto entrepreneurs/enthusiasts. Aaron thinks they sound like the sorts of people who might want an experimental cavity-preventing bacterium and have $20,000 to spend, so he’s hoping to sell at least twenty doses. But also, anyone else who wants the product can go on a medical tourism trip to Prospera and get it in their experimental-treatment clinic.
Inline links: a two month super-conference, experimental-treatment clinic
Will Prospera have 10,000 residents on 1/1/2026? Answer: 35%
Will Prospera have 10,000 residents on 1/1/2026? Answer: 35% All of these seem like plausible answers except the one on Prospera, which I would have placed more like 5%. Here’s what the AI has to say for itself: And here’s an example of what’s doing inside one of these subpoints (in this case, subpoint one about special economic zones with significant foreign investment): 55% of SEZs with significant investment reached population 10,000 after seven years, so that’s its base rate for this method. On the one hand, this is very impressive. It knows what Prospera is. It correctly identified the main factor threatening its growth (the ongoing legal case with Honduras). It came up with some really interesting base rates, calculated them, and weighted them for relevance. All of this is great. But I don’t see it doing what would be the obvious first step for me, which is finding the current population of Prospera and how fast it’s growing. Plausibly this is because there are no news stories about this, and you sort of have to estimate it by following how many apartments are being built there and how much is happening (my guess is current population 400, growing to 1,200 by 2026). I talked to a FutureSearch representative, who agreed that it dropped the ball on this question, but pointed out that if prompted slightly differently, it gives a better answer: How many residents will live in Prospera, a new special economic zone in Honduras, on Jan 1, 2026? Answer: 600 (80% confidence interval 100-2,000)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!egMZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4c7a927d-5bb3-4332-82d5-2c001c56691b_1046x1176.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FE_P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ce4fe2b-1e8e-435c-88cf-acddfb901781_842x688.png
55% of SEZs with significant investment reached population 10,000 after seven years, so that’s its base rate for this method. On the one hand, this is very impressive. It knows what Prospera is. It correctly identified the main factor threatening its growth (the ongoing legal case with Honduras). It came up with some really interesting base rates, calculated them, and weighted them for relevance. All of this is great. But I don’t see it doing what would be the obvious first step for me, which is finding the current population of Prospera and how fast it’s growing. Plausibly this is because there are no news stories about this, and you sort of have to estimate it by following how many apartments are being built there and how much is happening (my guess is current population 400, growing to 1,200 by 2026). I talked to a FutureSearch representative, who agreed that it dropped the ball on this question, but pointed out that if prompted slightly differently, it gives a better answer: How many residents will live in Prospera, a new special economic zone in Honduras, on Jan 1, 2026? Answer: 600 (80% confidence interval 100-2,000)
3: I’ve said good things about the Prospera charter city and their libertarian approach to medical regulation. Supporting a libertarian approach to medical regulation doesn’t mean everything will work and there won’t be any scams, it just posits that the benefits will be worth these downsides. Still, I feel an obligation to let people know when one of them probably doesn’t work, so here’s a convincing-seeming takedown of the Prospera-based Minicircle clinic (see also SarahC’s writeup).
His team had originally been looking into minicircles, tiny pieces of DNA related to bacterial plasmids. In theory, you can put the gene you want on a minicircle, deliver it via IV into your patient, let it seep into cells, and get them to express the gene for a few months until the minicircles degrade - no scary permanent genetic engineering required. With the right combination of minicircles, you might be able to get cells to mimic Cameron’s FAAH-OUT mutation. There was even an experimental clinic in the libertarian charter city of Prospera that seemed willing to handle the logistics once they designed the gene. After treating a few people, maybe some pharma company or government would take notice.
But by the time of our interview, this plan was falling apart. Minicircles are hard to make. They can’t get inside cells efficiently enough to do much. Even if they could get into peripheral cells, they’d have trouble crossing the blood-brain barrier and getting into brain cells. The clinic in Prospera claimed to have solved some of these problems, but it seems to be either confused or fraudulent.
Inline links: but it seems to be either confused or fraudulent
I asked it to predict the chance that Prospera would have a population of at least 1,000 in 2027. Like FutureSearch on the same question, it cited many interesting news articles on Prospera’s chances but failed to do the basic step of figuring out its current population and growth rate. It eventually concluded 35% chance, which is reasonable enough. But when asked whether Prospera would have a population of 100,000 in 2028, it also said 35% chance, which is absurd.
The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities, including Prospera, unconstitutional.
Inline links: has declared charter cities
Prospera’s lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if you’re right, who do you appeal to?
So the city is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. The first prong is waiting. Prospera is a collection of buildings and people. The buildings can stay standing, the people can still live there - they just have to follow regular Honduran law, rather than the investment-friendly charter they previously used. There’s another election in November, which the socialists are expected to lose. Prospera hopes the conservatives will come in, take control of the Supreme Court again, and then they’ll say whoops, messed it up again, charter cities are constitutional after all.
Inline links: another election in November
Same state curriculum, same worksheets, same pace. The school philosophy was “no acceleration—just go deep.” We knew this was the philosophy going in. The pitch was that instead of accelerating through the state curriculum the teachers would take their time with the kids and allow them to fully explore and master the content of each grade. When we asked for examples of what that meant in practice we were told things like: “Instead of reading more advanced vocabulary, the students will learn to read out loud and use emotion and character impressions. They will learn how to vary the timing of their reading like where and when to pause to create emotion in the listener”. That sounded reasonable! It sounded like more learning, but just different learning than what the state had mandated. In practice that was not what happened. In practice “deep” just meant “un‑measured.” Smart kids + small classes ≠ accountability. The kids had time to do music, lego building, theatre and Friday ski trips because they were all really bright. They didn’t need 6+ hours a day to learn the limited math required by the state, and since the school did not feel the need to advance faster than the state, there was no pressure to push learning at all – on anything really. There was no overall school curriculum. Every teacher did their own thing. While one first grade class had weekly spelling bees, the teacher in the other classroom did not believe in learning spelling at all. But it didn’t matter. The metrics they measured the kids on in both classes advanced “enough” that no one was concerned. Most time wasn’t spent on math or language anyway. Beyond the brochure activities like skiing and theater and the four hours of foreign language per week they split between Spanish and Mandarin (which was really a great opportunity for the kids who already spoke Spanish and Mandarin to have their egos flattered. I did not see any learning in either language class. I don’t see how you can teach a language a couple of hours a week to a group of 18 kids with skill levels from zero to fluency and expect to have any impact), a lot of time was spent on DEI. DEI was pitched as helping kids handle the emotions that often come from being sensitive gifted children (they called it “Synapse”). In practice my oldest daughter got four years of learning about the basic ideas of Martin Luther King Junior and Rosa Parks, a rough understanding that some people are non-binary, and a great deal of anxiety every time I left the water running while I was brushing my teeth. The talent drain In Spring 2024 the “intermediate-school” head resigned, as did the 40+ year veteran science teacher we had been looking forward to our daughter having, the beloved tech teacher who had built a her own proprietary “learn to type” software, plus half the lower‑school faculty. Our oldest was going to be entering fourth grade; her incoming roster read like a rebuilding year for a professional sports team. It was possible we could get her into a middle school that would feed into a top tier high school, but those did not start until 5th grade. Our best option looked like “suck it up and accept whatever we had for at least a year”. One option was to do something radical. We considered taking a GAP year and traveling the world with an organization called “Boundless” but decided the timing wasn’t right. Earlier in the year we had started exploring moving to the charter city of Prospera. There is a Montessori school there that seemed like it might be alright. And we could surround the kids with an interesting group of people (and live on the beach!). But by the spring we had ruled it out. There did not seem to be many families as part of the community and we were not comfortable with the risk profile based on what was happening with the conflict between Honduras and their charter cities. Then I stumbled across Alpha: Two‑hour mornings, life‑skills afternoons, claims of 2x learning. Marketing copy is cheap; still, the promise was different enough to warrant due diligence. The initial plan was to fly some of the kids to Austin for an Alpha summer camp for a week in June – just to try it out. But once we started exploring more my wife asked me: “Could we actually move to Austin and try it for a year? Based on what is happening at the kids' school, this might be the year to try it.” So over eight weeks we flew to Austin five times – conversations with admissions and school heads, real estate searches, kids doing shadow‑days. Every parent we spoke to was very impressed with the school. Their kids really were advancing at 2x+ speed – and no one believed it was just a “selection effect”. And every guide I spoke to was extremely impressive themselves. They reminded me of the staff you run into when visiting Disney World. They all seemed “full faced” and fully-engaged. When I asked the head of admissions how they found such good staff he told me their compensation was fully transparent. “Associate Guides” were paid $60,000/year (vs the $40,000 average for Austin teachers), “Full Guides” made $100,000 and the five “Head Guides” in the school each made $150,000. They were able to both poach the best teachers from other schools, but also bring exceptional people into teaching that would not have considered it otherwise. It also let them have very high expectations for teachers once they were hired. We pulled the trigger in July. New house. Admissions letter signed. Moving truck (plus car-mover) scheduled for October. Worst case, it would be a one‑year sabbatical from stagnation. The hypothesis I carried south Elite private school attendance buys you smaller classes, brighter kids, and fancier field trips – not academic acceleration. If Alpha was real, we’d see that differential, measurable impact by Christmas – that was when we would need to decide if we would cut bait and re-apply to schools back home (and sign the kids up for more IQ-tests. The school would not accept old ones). That prior—show me velocity, not polish—is the lens through which the rest of this review should be read. Part Two: A History of Alpha Note: This is my best attempt at piecing together the history of the school based on conversations with co‑founder MacKenzie Price, high school head Chris Locke, Alpha staff, and Alpha parents; All dates are estimates and I am SURE I have gotten some details wrong. I will come back after the fact in the comments and make corrections as I hear from the people involved with corrections. 2013 – 2017 | Garage‑School to “Alpha” MacKenzie Price, then a mortgage broker in Austin, wasn’t impressed by the city’s gifted programs. She invited a small number of neighbourhood kids (including her two) into a makeshift microschool that ran two intense, teacher‑led academic “sprints” each morning, then “life‑skills” projects after lunch. Joe Liemandt — Founder of Trinity Technology, ESW Capital billionaire and family friend (MacKenzie’s husband worked for him) — kept his own children in conventional private school until he saw the qualitative improvement in the life skills of MacKenzie’s kids. He decided he wanted his kids to join MacKenzie’s but he wanted to take the project to the next level. Sometime around 2014-2017 he joined MacKenzie as a co-founder and started writing checks. Alpha recruited more students and guides and the operation jumped from location-to-location looking for a larger permanent home. 2017 – 2020 | K-8 Expansion and 2-hour focus Alpha grew to roughly 90 students from K‑8 and stabilized. Morning “core blocks” were still teacher‑driven (20‑minute bursts, 5‑minute breaks, rinse, repeat), but focused on students engaged in exercises with rapid feedback (not lectures). Afternoon workshops covered “life skills” like how to give and receive feedback or public speaking. I have not seen academic data from this time period, but when I spoke to Chris Locke, head of Alpha’s high school (which launched around 2020), he told me the kids coming into his 9th grade program were “fine,” academically – it was their life skills, confidence, and ability to engage with adults and their peers were exceptional. At this stage no AI, no dashboard, no 2x learning, no portal — just better ratios and focused pacing and the result was well balanced kids who were enjoying their education experience (even if they were unexceptional academically). 2020 – 2022 | Platform Era Begins Somewhere along the way Liemandt hired a small engineering team to stitch together edtech learning tools. Many schools use tools like iXL, Beast Academy and Amira. Those tools fit in well with the 2-hour structured approach Alpha was using. The “platform” Liemandt’s team built was meant as a tool to free up guide time so that students could be more self-directed. The dev team stitched together the preferred off‑the‑shelf apps behind a single login, and built out tracking and dashboards so guides (and students) could easily see how they were progressing. This also gave the curriculum team (there was a curriculum team now) data to understand where students were spending their time, what tools were working, and which weren’t as effective. The Alpha Portal was born. Not only did it increase efficiency, it provided data to iterate with. Chris Locke saw the curve change incrementally: each new cohort of ninth‑graders under the new tech-enabled learning platform came in a little stronger academically. The “life skills” were now being matched by the “academic skills”. 2022 | Expansion and Iteration By having access to Alpha kids post-graduation in the high school, Locke could send feedback back to the elementary school.The kids coming out of the new program were now killing it academically on Math, Language, and Science, but they were still weak on things like History and Geography. He fed that type of information back to the curriculum designers, who iterated and improved the program. Soon, in addition to the core platform that directed students to third-party tools, the tech team was building proprietary “Alpha” tools themselves. The flagship of the in-house tools was “AlphaReads”. AlphaReads requires students to read progressively more complicated passages, followed by answering reading comprehension questions. In addition to helping the kids improve reading skills, Alpha uses it to push types of content. Instead of classes in history, geography, economics and political science, some of the reading passages will cover that material (in addition to learning how to read and understand Shakespeare and Proust). The success of the 2-hour learning platform was giving the Alpha founders confidence. Liemandt in particular wanted to see if the program had legs beyond the elite group of students being educated in Austin. Alpha’s first external test in August 2022 in Brownsville, TX – a small community on the Mexico border with less than half the per capita income of Austin. SpaceX had recently launched Starbase in Brownsville in 2014 and the employees there were not happy with the existing school options. Someone at SpaceX approached Alpha and asked if they could launch a new campus for their employees. It is unclear if any money changed hands, but when Alpha launched their Brownsville campus (available to SpaceX employees and any other locals who are interested) tuition was only $10,000 (vs $40,000 at the main Austin campus); incoming students trailed national academic standards by over a year. But after nine months on the Alpha program the first cohort of students had caught up and surpassed the national average, and they kept accelerating, achieving an average learning velocity of ~2× the national average (see section four for what that means). Brownsville was Alpha’s attempt to show that their model wasn’t just rich‑kid selection effects. Spring 2024 | Field Pilots & Ukraine Trip Alpha tuition is high for the Austin area ($40,000 vs average private school ~$10,000-$15,000), but unlike most private schools tuition is all-inclusive. There are no extra fees for computers or field trips. There are no silent auctions or appeals for donations. This “no extra fees” allows the school to do some pretty ridiculous things. In the first half of 2024 Alpha sent a group of students to Poland to help launch a 2-hour learning pilot among Ukrainian refugees. Students did not pay to go on the trip. But students also did not have a “right” to go on the trip. They had to earn it. In addition to being on top of academic and non-academic expectations, students who wanted to participate had to learn basic Ukrainian so they could interact with the students in Poland they were meant to be helping. By not linking the opportunity to payment, the school could instead link it to behavior and achievement. This year a group of kids who learned to sail during the school year are going on a sailing trip through the Caribbean – for no additional fees to the parents. I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened. But it fits into the pattern of Alpha at this stage: “We know this program works for a specific type of kid. Let’s find out how broadly it is applicable. Can it work for everyone? Is it the solution for learning and education for the world?” Fall 2024 | “Pick‑Your‑Afternoon” Specialist Schools MacKenzie told me that there was consensus among the current parents of Alpha that the 2-hour learning program was exceptional and was making a huge difference with their kids. Their kids were all learning at breathtaking speed in a very condensed period of time. But there was NOT consensus about what the kids should be doing in the other 22-hours of the day. Some parents wanted to utilize the platform’s capabilities to go even faster. Some wanted their kids to just chill out and enjoy the rest of their day – let kids be kids. Others wanted their kids to use the freed up time to do sports, or study music. It was clear to her that “learn more faster in a short period of time” was a universal desire. But beyond that it was unclear what the “right” solution for the rest of her program was. You can make the morning ultra-personalized, but if the goal of the afternoon is socialization that you are missing in the morning, you need to have some sort of alignment on how to spend that afternoon. That challenge led to Alpha’s 2024 expansion into specialty schools. Three micro‑campuses opened August 2024: GT School (Georgetown, TX) — Alpha’s “Gifted and Talented” School. Higher admissions bar; higher academic expectations; Afternoon programming focused on excelling in “academic competitions” like chess, go, debate, public speaking, robotics, programming and Quiz Bowl.
Building codes are inflexible and designed around the more-common modern styles. Getting robots to mass-produce ornament solves problems 1 and 2, and doing it in a model city with a ground-level commitment to ornament solves problem 3. Sramek writes: Our renderings do not tell the full story. Getting architecture right in a way that is also scalable and affordable is hard. And until now, we’ve been focused on the things “lower down in the stack” that need to be designed first – land use plans, urban design, transportation, open space, infrastructure, etc. But I started this company nearly a decade ago precisely because I felt that so much of our world had become ugly, and I wanted to live, and have my kids grow up, in a place that appreciates craft and beauty. This is one of the clearest examples of what I love about model cities. There are lots of things that everyone (or at least a substantial proportion) of people want, which people aren’t doing - not because there’s some strong opposition or technical challenges, but because the system is too complex/diffuse/ossified to permit change. A lot of what I love about California is downstream of its geography as the westernmost part of the western world - the people who felt confined by Europe fled to America, and the people who felt confined by America fled to California, and until recently it was an open space big enough for new experiments to grow. I think of “California Forever” as a nod to that heritage, and a test of whether some of those sparks still survive. The Siege Of Prospera In the 2010s, a conservative Honduran government decided to allow experimental “ZEDEs” - semi-autonomous charter cities - in the country. Several projects sprung up, most notably Prospera and Ciudad Morazan, and met some early success. In 2022, the socialists took over and decided to end the experiment. They were able to ban the creation of new ZEDEs, but had more trouble disbanding existing projects. They found there were two legal roadblocks. First, the founders of the ZEDE system - well aware of how sudden shifts in governments could destroy charter cities - fortified their law with constitutional protections making it near-impossible to repeal. Second, they signed international treaties giving charter city investors the right to sue Honduras for very large amounts if it tried to destroy their hard work. How do you repeal a law that says it would be unconstitutional to repeal it? The socialist-controlled Honduran Supreme Court tried their best, saying that the law had retroactively itself been unconstitutional, and so existing ZEDEs had retroactively been illegal the whole time. However, the court failed to remove the entire thicket of legal protection surrounding the ZEDE system; in particular, they did not strike down Article 94 of the Constitution, which said that unconstitutionality rulings could not be enforced retroactively. So as far as anyone can tell, the current status of ZEDEs is that it is illegal for them to exist, but also illegal for the government to take any action to remove them. On their way out, the Court ordered some penalties against “companies that became ZEDEs”, which is not really how this works (companies can found ZEDEs, but they don’t become ZEDEs; this is like saying “companies that became cell phones”) and which therefore nobody has tried to collect. Why did the government’s case end so farcically? Honduras-watchers suggest that the Court was trying to balance its obligations to the government, to the integrity of the legal system, and to practicality. The government really wanted an anti-ZEDE victory to present to its voters. The integrity of the legal system made it hard to apply ex post facto judgments. And practically, the whole case ran up against the second layer of protections the ZEDE founders built around their project: the investor treaties. If Honduras were to end ZEDEs, ZEDE investors could sue in international court. Prospera’s investors have already sued for $11 billion - a third of Honduras’ GDP. The case is currently tied up in international courts, with the delay being amenable to both sides; the government expects to lose, and the Prosperans would rather keep the suit as a threat they can hold over the Hondurans’ head than actually get a judgment in their favor - which would be bad PR, and which they expect Honduras would not pay. (also, although the Trump administration hasn’t taken a firm stance, Prospera seems like the sort of thing they would like, and Honduras is nervous about offending them too badly) Since the government doesn’t seem to be able to legally shut down Prospera, they’ve resorted to harassing it - especially trying to debank it. This might have worked, if not for the fact that a certain $4 trillion weird Ponzi casino industry has always imagined itself as having a fig-leaf purpose of “what if a utopian libertarian island-city got debanked by a repressive socialist government and could only save itself if there were a entirely new kind of financial infrastructure totally different from the regular one?”; although I imagine they were just as surprised as anyone else when this exact scenario suddenly played out in real life, nobody can deny they were extremely prepared for it. So the attempted harassment has fallen flat too, and the government doesn’t have a lot of options. Further developments hinge on next month’s big election. The candidates seem like a colorful bunch: Polling has been contradictory: …with Rixi Moncada (socialist), Salvador Nasralla (liberal), and Nasry Zablah (right-wing) all making strong showings. My impression is Moncada would be worst for Prospera, Zablah best, and Nasralla somewhere in the middle. Meanwhile, my contact in Prospera reports that life in the city continues as normal, with most residents relatively insulated from the lawfare happening around them. They are up to 300 registered companies, a nearly-full office tower, a few residential developments under construction, and frequent conferences on relevant topics like crypto and biotech. From Techbro To Sherbro Sherbro, Sierra Leone. A place synonymous in the popular imagination with the phrase “Sherbro, Sierra Leone”. Population 30,000. Size 230 square miles (or “just a little bit smaller than Singapore”, according to its boosters). There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)
Inline links: writes, next month’s big election, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!l_xq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e3c5722-3adf-42c5-adaf-1b764f17a88c_954x744.png, has been contradictory, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8egi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F599bd553-836b-4c70-8128-5ae37cb6b4fc_675x517.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UMhi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd5972e52-4f45-41ea-a520-a17cd78b7d8d_762x721.png, Sherbro Island City, the podcast, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!w7Zj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb01bfbd8-7896-4274-946e-fe0659c9cd5a_920x613.jpeg, source
…with Rixi Moncada (socialist), Salvador Nasralla (liberal), and Nasry Zablah (right-wing) all making strong showings. My impression is Moncada would be worst for Prospera, Zablah best, and Nasralla somewhere in the middle. Meanwhile, my contact in Prospera reports that life in the city continues as normal, with most residents relatively insulated from the lawfare happening around them. They are up to 300 registered companies, a nearly-full office tower, a few residential developments under construction, and frequent conferences on relevant topics like crypto and biotech. From Techbro To Sherbro Sherbro, Sierra Leone. A place synonymous in the popular imagination with the phrase “Sherbro, Sierra Leone”. Population 30,000. Size 230 square miles (or “just a little bit smaller than Singapore”, according to its boosters). There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UMhi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd5972e52-4f45-41ea-a520-a17cd78b7d8d_762x721.png, Sherbro Island City, the podcast, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!w7Zj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb01bfbd8-7896-4274-946e-fe0659c9cd5a_920x613.jpeg, source
Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)
Inline links: source
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